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I haven't gotten a chance to work with the graphite tools in max for resurfacing yet. What are the general problem areas that you have to pay attention to when working with it? For example I normally use topogun for my retopo work and the only issues I run into are that the camera wont do local rotation/zoom so its hard to work on things like fingers.

Thanks for the detailed answers by the way. I know it's helping out a lot of people here.

Its really hard to explain. Sometimes it feels like it "clicks through" and turns itself off. Once it does this once it will keep doing it pretty rapidly until you reset max. I will try things like converting the trace object to Mesh and then back to Poly. I will run a weld on it at a sort of low threshold. Anything to get it to not do that. It does this quit a bit. It kidna just shuts itself off.

Also i find its best never to Undo in it. I never undo. You sometimes get polys that dont actually exist. you pull things around and they get messed up. OR. What you do is you pull something around and then you hit undo and its obvious that something seems amiss. then you right click to stop using the tool and thats when you see a poly pop up that wasn't there before. They may have fixed this but in the past i've had that lead to a corrupt mesh (red mesh). So what I do is.

1. Never undo. Its better to just back out of the tool. fix it by hand (weld or delete etc..) perhaps convert to mesh and then back (i have shortcut keys for this) and then go back into the tool.
2. After a lot of work is done, export out an OBJ. I find its good to sometimes save raw work as OBJs instead of .max. You'll know something is up if you import that obj in and there are skewed polys you didn't see before .

This is just a heads up incase anybody dives head first into that tool and is like "WHAT THE!!!" I learned the hard way with it. When I had to restart max too much on some characeters I would actually flush the entire max file. And have a trace file only. That actually hleped alot.

Thanks a lot for the detailed reply. Looks like I'll be sticking with topogun for a while then lol. I'll give it a shot at some point. After all, there is never anything wrong with learning new software or techniques.

Well that's all the questions I have for right now, I appreciate the replys. Good luck with all your future projects.

Its really hard to explain. Sometimes it feels like it "clicks through" and turns itself off. Once it does this once it will keep doing it pretty rapidly until you reset max. I will try things like converting the trace object to Mesh and then back to Poly. I will run a weld on it at a sort of low threshold. Anything to get it to not do that. It does this quit a bit. It kidna just shuts itself off.

Also i find its best never to Undo in it. I never undo. You sometimes get polys that dont actually exist. you pull things around and they get messed up. OR. What you do is you pull something around and then you hit undo and its obvious that something seems amiss. then you right click to stop using the tool and thats when you see a poly pop up that wasn't there before. They may have fixed this but in the past i've had that lead to a corrupt mesh (red mesh). So what I do is.

1. Never undo. Its better to just back out of the tool. fix it by hand (weld or delete etc..) perhaps convert to mesh and then back (i have shortcut keys for this) and then go back into the tool.
2. After a lot of work is done, export out an OBJ. I find its good to sometimes save raw work as OBJs instead of .max. You'll know something is up if you import that obj in and there are skewed polys you didn't see before .

This is just a heads up incase anybody dives head first into that tool and is like "WHAT THE!!!" I learned the hard way with it. When I had to restart max too much on some characeters I would actually flush the entire max file. And have a trace file only. That actually hleped alot.

Mike, have you tried Silo or Topogun?
Some people say they're the best to reconstruct the mesh.
What other retopo tool you can recommend?

Droma is right. I use many things but Graphite polysurf is probably a key one to know.

- I export out division 1 of the model and use it in parts (often i plan this ahead before sculpting, in some cases)

- I polysurf with Graphite, although that tool is incredibly buggy. You have to learn its quirks and may have to reset Max a lot in process

- By hand, especially when Graphite is not digging what i've got going on for some reason.

- Using old pieces of geo perfect matched or close-to matching. (this can include taking low poly chunks from the other awesome artists at Epic... Anything to get it done..)

I know some other artists here have used different tools out there for this process.

One time I placed verts around on the surface and then created polys out of those verts (or basically detaching off key verts). I don't really recommend that. I ended up getting really lost in what I was trying to do and was creating planes out of the wrong ones

- I trace over a "Trace Model". For instance on the Hoffman pic above, If I can, I will have a model of each chunk you see there. Upper Body, Legs, Shoes, Arms etc.. Then I will highly decimate whole subtools and bring them in in those same chunks. Then I polysurf over those chunks. My thought is no more than 400k triangles is good. And you dont need the full guy. often 1 arm and half the body etc... works. My low poly will be like Orange while my Tracer models will be Blue. These trace models can be thrown away after your done if you really needed.

Everybody here has really great skills in getting things as low as possible. Its always a balance war there. A lot of my stuff is lower poly because its a common enemy and not seen in cinematics really. Or it doesn't have a deformable face. So you try to offset anywhere you can and afford the polys for the good stuff. Then sometimes I have to go back in and run cuts around the upper shoulder area where the camera is angled. I'm known for making my legs too low poly so that when I see them in game the normals have a warble effect running around them. Wyeth catches me on those . The Armored Kantus was really difficult in the budget.

Woww amazing really thanks for your precious time It's an honor for me that u answer,and now I got the idea and the inspiration to make some better works on ZB at Future Thankkss!!! and congratulations for that Inmortal Job Epic now Is part of wikipedia

Hi guys, great work. I just finished the game, it sincerely looks amazing.
I have a lil question : what is the typical bone count for each character? I mean for ennemies, playable characters, bosses... Do you use a different skeleton/setup during RTCs? Do different characters/ennemies share the same skeleton?
Thanks in advance for your reply!

Sorry, I hadn't read this thread in awhile so I didn't respond earlier. You're right though, I should give more constructive feedback. I don't think I was particularly rude, however. I'll respond more in detail since it was requested.

The first character is too busy. His double shoulder pads seem unnecessary (I would think one is fine; two just adds unneeded detail). His arms have too many straps holding on the excessive plating, making that area also feel cluttered. The "pants" that he is wearing make his legs look too heavy to properly walk, let alone run. I think overall this design suffers from too many repeated details that are often unnecessary and only add to what I feel is a cluttered look. Essentially a "less is more" approach is needed here, I think.

The second character, the human, is great. Large open areas complimented with tight detailed areas gives my eye places to travel to around the mesh. I love it.

The third character (boss with long arms) isn't bad overall, though I wish he had actual shoulders. Having too much stuff around his head makes me lose interest in that general area where ideally I think that should be a focal point.

The fourth character (boss with one long arm) feels like another example of just repeated shapes for the sake of adding detail. Instead of just having straps holding on his armor he has straps that have lots of stitching on them. I feel like there should always be a balance and in this case the "skin" parts of the model are extremely detailed yet so are the non-skin pieces, leading to too much detail (in my opinion). I find it weird, as well, that this guy would be wearing clothes of any kind given that so much of him is grotesquely disfigured.

The fifth character (zombie looking thing). No complaints here. Great design. Good balance of detailed areas and non-detailed areas.

The sixth character (pointy head guy). I like the upper half of this guy but I do not care for the lower half. His upper body armor has flat areas lacking details complimented with detailed areas, and his skin does as well. Pretty cool there. The lower body, however, is a cluster of straps and 900-lb boots and more straps, and on top of those some more straps. This whole area could have been simplified into something less detail intense.

The seventh character (human). No complaints.

The last guy (a human black guy in a trench coat). No real complaints though I've never liked the ridiculously oversized shoes that Gears characters have. I think it's a style they're obviously going for so I can only argue that from a personal preference.

So there you have it, since you asked for it. That's my professional, constructive criticism on why I think these designs suffer from bad design choices.

Your comment sounds of someone that hasn't read a book on design and doesn't properly understand the way thing can be designed.
Its the artist preference. There is always going to be the "woah that couldn't have been like i wanted it"
but if you can't match Epic's artist level-of-detail then go study something or make something better.

ZBrush - Narrowing the gap between Imagination and Manifestation DeviantART

Savage models!!

Wow thank you for the inspiration bomb. You guys are really pushing the boundaries further and further everyday, and for that I applaud you all!
We can all learn a great deal from these images. Keep it up you savages!

What software did you use to generate your normal, ao and cavity maps.

Hi!

We use Max to generate the normal maps in the scanline renderer. The supersampling feature smooths things out well too. The AO is made in Mental Ray (Xnormal at times as well), with a spread of 1.5-6, with the darkest going to a medium grey usually.

Yeah, geat, great, great +10x more. Please scale down your images so we can see it without scrolling.
I can understand you like to show the phototextures you used, but I like to have a clean view of the nice image you made.
More to tell, it's late...

So is this by far the great thread ever created on Zbrush Central? This is just down right disgusting how much Epic is putting up. Thank you soooooo much, everyone at Epic for not only creating this work but actually allowing you to post a good portion of your process on a public forum. This is just soo amazing and it benefits so many people now and far into the future.